Be Careful With Water Around Your Foundation

Leaky basements and damage to a foundation can happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes those reasons may lie not with the natural geography and weather of a region, but with what people themselves do to their home. Water usage is one of those factors that can have a big impact on a home, but homeowners often don’t realize that they may be their foundation’s own worst enemy when it comes to home health. Are you causing any of these problems for your home?

Over Watering

It’s easy to make this mistake, especially during hot summer months when no rain has come. If you have a lawn and a garden, you want to ensure these plants look their best, so naturally, you’ll water them. If the summer has been especially hot, you may feel tempted to take extra precautions to ensure the health of your plants. However, excessive watering, while good for your plants, may not be so good for the soil, and, ultimately that will affect your foundation as well.

Water does not distribute evenly throughout the soil, for any number of reasons such as different types of soil layers. This means that there are dry and wet portions of soil, and these pockets can create differential swelling pressure on a foundation.

Improper Drainage

This is one of the simplest fixes, and yet many people fail to take it into account. The gutter that collects rain water from your roof sends that water down a pipe which eventually pours out that water at the side of your house. The exit point of the pipe should extend several feet away from your house. It should not be adjacent to your home, because this means that every time rain falls, all that water from the roof is being concentrated on a point that is right beside your home and your foundation. Over the years, this can not only cause the water penetrate your home, into your basement, it can even have an effect on the foundation itself.

By carefully assessing how and where you use your water around your home, you can prevent a lot of potential basement and foundation issues yourself. And if you have any doubts, ask an expert, like AA Action Waterproofing to come down and conduct an inspection of your home to see if we can help to trace and identify a problem, then provide a solution for it.